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This is my first hacker news post using Chrome. JaegerMonkey and TraceMonkey both failed, I'm tired of waiting. The three curent builds of FF (nightly, beta and release) are horrendous on Mac. Two Windows and 15 tabs (total) will cost you ~1GB to ~1.5GB ram. After sticking with FF since before it was called Firefox, I have made the move to Chrome. FF simply became unusable in a work environment.

I'm tired of Mozilla coming out with their righteous BS about standards etc. They get distracted by every shiny object (mobile OS, mobile browser) when their flag ship product is in dire need of some love (UI/UX , memory leaks, JS speed, etc.) Part of their goal this year was to close the gap with Chrome, for me I've only seen it widen and I dont think Chrome has improved that much...

1 comments

Chrome for Mac is a 32-bit application. Firefox for Mac is a 64-bit application. If you force Firefox to open in 32-bit mode (by editing Firefox.app's "Get Info" settings in the Finder), its memory footprint is smaller (but you lose some of the 64-bit benefits of large address space and ASLR).

Also, I assume you are adding up the memory footprint of all of Chrome's processes? ;)

Thank you, but your post is somewhat patronizing. Yes, I have accounted for each Chrome process. And you forgot to tick one of the 'we're in denial that FF sucks' boxes...what plugins are you using (aka blame the plugins).

I'm apposed to hacking the settings and installing 32-bit versions. It should give somewhat acceptable performance out of the box. I'm not adding bandaids, FF has wasted enough of my time.

I wasn't suggesting that forcing 32-bit mode was a solution. I was just pointing out that comparing the memory footprint of 32-bit and 64-bit applications is not apples-to-apples.

Also, Mac OS X 10.6 and earlier do not support ASLR for 32-bit applications and ASLR's effectiveness is reduced with a smaller address space.

See Chromium Issue 18323 ("Need more bits: 64-bit Mac version") from 2009: http://crbug.com/18323